How to Upload Your First Video to Scoutzera

Before you upload — what Scoutzera accepts

Scoutzera is a video-only tool. It accepts video files — MP4, MOV, and MKV all work reliably — but not audio files, PDFs, or links to YouTube or Vimeo. The reason for this is straightforward: the whole product is built around scrubbing through a video, pausing on a specific frame, and pinning a note to that exact moment. That workflow requires a file the player can actually seek through.

Upload the rough cut your editor needs to work from — not the finished export. The rough cut has the raw timing, the ungraded frames, and the pacing decisions still left to make. That's what your notes need to reference. Uploading a polished master after the fact makes the notes contextually wrong, because the timestamps won't match the version your editor is working in.

Storage counts against your plan. Before uploading a large batch, check Settings → Storage to confirm you have enough headroom. A 20-minute 4K rough cut can easily run to several gigabytes, so it's worth checking before the upload fails halfway through.

How to start an upload

From the Videos page, click the "+ Upload" button in the top right corner. A modal opens immediately. You can either drag and drop your file onto the modal or click the upload area to browse your local files. Both methods work; drag-and-drop is faster if you already have a Finder or Explorer window open next to the browser.

File size validation happens client-side before the upload starts. If the file you've selected would exceed your storage quota, you'll see an error right away — the upload won't begin, and you won't have to wait for it to fail partway through. Once a valid file is selected, a display name field appears below the file picker. The field is pre-filled with your filename, but you should change it to something that will still make sense in a week. "Ep23 rough v2" is useful. "FINAL_FINAL_v4_export.mp4" is not — especially once you have 30 videos in your library and need to find this one fast.

What happens during upload

After you click Upload, a progress bar tracks the percentage of your file that's been transferred to the server. For large files on a slower connection, this can take a few minutes — the browser tab is safe to leave open while it runs. Don't close the modal or navigate away; doing so will cancel the transfer.

Once the progress bar hits 100%, the status changes to "Finalizing." This is the server confirming the file was received intact and written correctly to storage. It usually takes a few seconds. When finalization completes, the modal automatically closes (after a brief success state) and your video appears in the library grid. If the upload fails at any point, you'll see an error message explaining what went wrong. Close the modal and try again — partial uploads don't persist, so you're starting fresh.

The processing state

Immediately after the video appears in the grid, its thumbnail shows a placeholder. The server is processing the file to generate a playable version — transcoding it into a format the browser player can stream efficiently. This usually takes anywhere from a few seconds for a short clip to a couple of minutes for a longer file. The card will update automatically once processing is complete.

If the thumbnail hasn't appeared after a few minutes, refresh the page. Processing is happening in the background and the page won't notify you automatically when it finishes. Importantly, processing does not block annotation — once the video opens in the player, you can start leaving notes immediately, even if the thumbnail in the grid is still loading. The player and the processing pipeline are independent.

What's next

Once your video is uploaded, click the card to open the video notes page. This is where you'll scrub through the video and build your brief — pausing at each moment you want to flag, writing a note, and letting Scoutzera pin it to that timestamp. The notes panel and the progress bar work together: every note you save appears as a marker on the scrubber, so your editor can navigate the whole brief from the timeline.

If this video is part of a campaign or series — a YouTube batch, a product launch, a set of social cuts — you can attach it to a project after uploading. Projects give your editor a single share link that covers all the videos and a shared project brief for context that applies across every video in the set. You can do that from the Projects page at any time; you don't need to set it up before you start annotating.